


Eye for the Main Chance

by orphan_account



Category: Vertigo (1958)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 19:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"My name is Judy Barton.  I come from Salina, Kansas."<br/>But there is so much more to her life than that....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eye for the Main Chance

**Author's Note:**

> If there's such a thing as spoilers for a movie that was released well over fifty years ago, um...spoilers ahead? On the bright side, if you haven't seen the movie, this story makes even less sense than if you have. And if you're here even though you haven't seen the movie, for the love of all that you hold dear, go watch it as soon as possible. Just going by what's on screen, it is possibly the most gloriously neurotic messed up love story of all time. And I give that reccomendation that as someone whose absolutely most favorite movie ever is "Written on the Wind."

Judy Barton was very nearly the prettiest girl in her high school class in Salina, Kansas. Rose-Marie Watkins was the prettiest: she had slightly more delicate features and much more refined manners than Judy, and also a very strong vocation. Some of their classmates went from the graduation hall to the wedding chapel to the maternity ward. Rose-Marie Watkins went from the graduation hall to a very different kind of wedding chapel, because she was marrying God.

If she were inclined to think about God, Judy would thank Him for getting her to the graduation hall while avoiding wedding chapels or maternity wards. Everyone told Judy that she should go to Hollywood and get into the movies because she was so pretty, but Judy had a feeling that it took more than being pretty to get into the movies. And she wanted something else. She felt pulled westward (the only one of her teachers she liked was a big advocate of the Turner thesis), but had read enough to know that, inasmuch as there was old money in California, she’d find it, and hopefully marry it, in San Francisco, not in Los Angeles. Hell, she’d already been baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, so if the money was so old the surname was Spanish, that made no never-mind to her.

She never imagined just how she would meet, and even fall in love with, San Francisco Society Money.

She’d been in The City (and how she loved that everyone for a thousand miles referred to San Francisco that way) for about six months. Despite being the second-prettiest girl in a high school in Salina, Kansas, in San Francisco she was a shopgirl. At first, a very vulgar shopgirl. She observed the other shopgirls, both at her perfume counter and at other stores around town; I. Magnin was her favorite destination on her weekday off-days. She quickly realized that what she thought were the classy ways she accessorized her natural beauty were in fact quite vulgar. She started putting her hair up, wearing bras and making sure her earrings were no larger than her earlobes.

When Galvin Elster started paying attention to her not long after she had her nails professionally trimmed back and adorned with clear polish only, she at first assumed that she had successfully learned how to attract a man. After all, she had always wanted to be Mary from "The Women," not Crystal (in her high school production, she had actually played the arch Sylvia, to great local acclaim).

But it turned out he was only interested in her for her resemblance to his crazy wife, and because the climber in him recognized the climber in her. When he’d first told her about his wife’s “tragic suffering from insanity,” she mentally rolled her eyes. Usually it was simply “my wife doesn’t understand me.” Going to the extreme of “My wife doesn’t understand human life at all” was a bit of a novelty, but still a line.

Gradually, though, she’d allowed Gavin to seduce her, into his plot if not into his bed (frankly, he didn't seem interested in her that way; she'd have been insulted if he'd been more attractive). He’d woven a tale for her, frankly admitted his own mercenary nature in having married Madeleine in the first place, although he swore he’d found Madeline attractive enough, if not the great love of his life. Judy could believe that; clearly, the great love of Gavin’s life was money and status. But, Gavin had told her, Madeleine had been mad (and she’d thought how classy Gavin was, calling his wife “mad” rather than “crazy”). 

He’d talked her around to his point of view. Judy knew she was being manipulated and seduced, knew that Gavin had an instinct for exploiting human weakness, but then it wasn’t as though Judy herself was a novice at that game. Not long after Sue-Ann had become Judy’s stepmother, Judy had overheard her telling one of her frowzy friends that she just didn’t trust Judy. “That girl has an eye for the main chance,” Sue-Ann had said, then glugged back some cheap wine.

By then, Judy was too far beyond Sue-Ann’s reach to be insulted. She embraced the phrase. Of course she had an eye for the main chance. Sue-Ann, after all, had an eye for Judy’s dad, who was about as far from any possible definition of the main chance it was possible to be.

Gavin had been surprised when Judy had demanded to meet Madeleine. He’d dodged the issue as much as possible, but she’d convinced him, one way or another, that she needed to see the madness for herself. He’d taken her to the sanatorium, however reluctantly, and she’d met Madeleine: a pretty woman who, coloring and inherent good breeding aside, really did look like Judy (or did Judy look like Madeline? Judy never really cleared that contradiction up to her own satisfaction). Madeleine had clearly checked out of the luxury hotel that was her life and into some world Judy could only imagine.

Gavin himself lacked the imagination to conceive that Judy might have paid attention to where Madeleine was being housed, and he certainly never dreamed that Judy had the gumption and energy to visit Madeleine alone.

Gavin had told the staff that Judy was his wife’s cousin (and that was how he always referred to Madeleine: “my wife,” since, as far as he was concerned, that was the full extent of Madeleine’s identity: Gavin’s wife, or, if he was feeling especially descriptive and abundant, Gavin’s mad wife). 

Judy used that alibi as a passport, and visited Madeleine whenever she could get away. Since Gavin was busy establishing his own alibis, in upscale poker games, in university clubs, on golf courses, that became easier as Gavin became more complacent about Judy’s cooperation.

At first, Madeleine was carefully blank around Judy. At first, Judy was equally careful, and talked to Madeleine about nothing of consequence; took her on gentle walks in familiar surroundings. When Judy visited Madeleine alone, she saw a spark of intelligent recognition in Madeleine’s eyes; while Judy may not have known much about oblivion in a pill, she had seen enough of it in liquor store bottles to know that the staff only bothered to drug Madeleine with the really hard stuff when her husband was coming around. Judy’s unscheduled visits as a cousin, however, didn’t warrant that much tranquilization.

Gradually, Madeleine allowed herself to come to life around Judy. “You look like me,” was the first truly independent statement Madeleine made to Judy.

“I know,” Judy said apologetically. 

“It’s why he’s with you,” Madeleine said, and it was a statement, not an insult. 

“Yes,” Judy acknowledged. “And he has a plan.”

“Of course he does,” Madeleine sighed. “I doubt it ends well for me,” she added.

“It could,” Judy murmured, then added more assertively, “if we make sure it does.” Madeleine had looked at Judy then, with truly sharp intelligence and interest.

“And I thought you were just another cheap little mercenary,” Madeleine murmured in the poshest American accent Judy had ever heard.

Judy glanced around, and for once no one was looking at them. She dared to kiss Madeleine’s smooth cheek, bringing her arms up in a cousinly embrace even as she sweetly murmured in Madeleine’s ear.

“I am,” she whispered to Madeleine. “But your husband’s only bought me with cheap money. You can buy me with free kisses.” Judy had thought she was only manipulating the madwoman, covering her bets just in case she had to use Gavin and Madeleine as alibis against each other.

But Madeleine had inhaled a sharp breath, and everything fell into place for Judy. From then on, when Gavin gave her Madeleine’s clothes, Madeleine’s jewelry, Madeleine’s perfume, Judy had drawn a new and charged significance from Madeleine’s things…wearing Madeleine’s things gave Judy a thrill she had never known with any boy or man. As Gavin’s absurd plan drew closer to fruition, he moved her into Madeleine’s bedroom in their apartment in the Brocklebank; Judy tried very hard to feign lower-class surprise that husband and wife slept separately. Maybe, once, Judy Barton who came from Salina, Kansas would have been shocked that Gavin and Madeleine didn’t share a room or even a bed, but Madeleine’s whispered confessions had taught her otherwise long before Gavin had escorted her to her new room.

After that first visit with Gavin, after Judy had found herself drawn back to visit Madeleine on her own, and they had formed their bond, one day Judy and Madeleine had been settled under a tree by an intern who left them alone with a picnic lunch: Madeleine’s nutritionally supervised lunch and Judy’s own selection from The City. At first, Judy had brought discreet cognac bottles and chocolates and pate from City of Paris along with fresh fruit from the farmer’s market, but Madeleine had only been interested in the fresh fruit. Judy noticed that Madeleine’s own lunches, provided by the sanatorium, were a surprisingly appetizing array of simple sandwiches. “I like the food here,” Madeleine told her. “It’s simple and fresh. I guess they give us enough…artificial pleasures from their pill bottles.”

So Judy had only brought fruit, allowing sanatorium personnel to inspect it so Madeleine could have the extra Judy always made sure to bring. Judy wondered if the sanatorium people were conspiring; it seemed that Madeleine’s “tranquility from a pill” was only truly evident when Gavin visited. The rest of the time, Madeleine had good food, regular exercise, and, although this was never mentioned around Gavin, very lively bridge and chess games. 

The other patients, Judy noticed, could be nearly comatose on weekend visit days; the patients were much livelier during the week, when Judy was sometimes the only visitor, sometimes supplemented by one older woman’s favorite nephew (to Judy, he looked like James Dean, or a younger version of some of the causeless rebels in her own high school, but he treated his elderly aunt with a deliberate disrespect that she adored, since it was clearly a transparent ruse to disguise his utter devotion to the old lady, who clucked at him with affectionately disdainful reproach).

Madeleine claimed to hate the sanatorium, but to Judy it seemed like the sanatorium took much better care of her than anyone in her family ever had. Madeleine had passed from her parents’ house into Gavin’s hands with no one in her family allowing her to acknowledge that she was aware that a world existed beyond; while she would never say so to Madeleine, who clearly idolized her dead parents, Judy wondered if maybe they could have investigated Gavin a little more thoroughly since clearly they never dreamed of developing anything resembling skepticism or cynicism in their daughter.

Judy sometimes wondered if Gavin had somehow hastened their deaths before they could discover his true nature and shield their daughter from him. She shied away from those thoughts, though, since then she would have to think of Gavin’s ultimate plan and her own complicity in it.

Meanwhile, Judy and Madeleine sat under their favorite weeping willow while the sanatorium staff gave them ample privacy to talk. Judy explained Gavin’s plan to Madeleine, that he wanted to exploit Judy’s resemblance to Madeleine, and Madeleine’s own illness, but hadn’t figured the perfect angle. Madeleine sighed and said that the only confidence she had in her husband was that he would find that angle.

Judy looked around, always so cautious for both their sakes, then pulled Madeleine’s soft, warmly pliant body into her arms. “We’ll find the angle first,” she promised, and dared to lower her lips to Madeleine’s.

It was the first kiss they’d shared that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for cousinly affection. Judy only dared because Madeleine had told her what a horror she had found her wedding night to be. Judy had heard Gavin’s version of the same event (“she went from lovely innocent to frigid bitch in less than a half-hour,” he’d told Judy). Madeleine’s story was more detailed and more heartbreaking. Madeleine had known true love and physical ecstasy at Bryn Mawr, with her sophomore roommate, an English girl named Phyllidia. They’d been passionate beyond friendship, as had many of their classmates, and giggled with intoxication over the idea that they might use Phyllidia’s English eccentricity and Madeleine’s California money to form the perfect Boston marriage, ideally in a place with excellent weather, like Malta or Rhodes.

Madeleine told the story to Judy, looking carefully, paranoiacally, around before confessing that she’d told one of her cousins of the life she and Phyllidia had planned together during the summer before her junior year. Phyllidia had never returned to Bryn Mawr.

Judy shivered and, to avoid distressing Madeleine further, didn’t wonder aloud if Gavin didn’t, in fact, have more in common with Madeleine’s parents than differing background would have suggested. Gavin was, Madeleine told her during another visit, “absolutely brutal” on their wedding night. “It was as if he didn’t even want me to have a chance of liking it,” Madeleine had said with a combination of heartbreakingly innocent bewilderment and matter of fact acceptance of Gavin’s utter vileness as a human being.

Madeleine herself was rearranging Judy’s world. When she started visiting Madeleine, under Gavin’s supervision, she wanted to reassure herself that she could set aside her cheaply bought scruples to help Gavin murder a woman who would rather be dead anyway. But she’d sensed something more than a bit wrong about Madeleine’s reactions during that supervised visit; that was why she had gone back without Gavin in tow.

Judy had always enjoyed her own body; she’d known from an early age that nice girls didn’t and had also known from a nearly as equally early age that she wasn’t a nice girl. Instead, she’d tamped down her own reactions to the Salina boys so that no one would know she wasn’t a nice girl. She’d shut them down early, even while sometimes it seemed like every nerve in her body was informing her, with commanding insistence, that she was anything but a nice girl. She knew that she was supposed to kiss a boy until he was panting and begging, and then demand he take her home. She also knew, vaguely, that she wasn’t supposed to go home just as desperate for orgasm as the boy whose advances she’d primly halted (and “orgasm” was a word she only learned later, after she just called it “all the way” within the confines of her own ill-informed mind).

But Madeleine…being with her was a revelation. Once Madeleine had assured herself that she and her “cousin” had some privacy, she had become less docile and more herself, more a sort of casually happy girl, like one of Judy's classmates back in Salina. Having heard about Madeleine's joy in Phyllidia's body, Judy could even imagine herself as one of Madeleine’s classmates at Bryn Mawr, especially once Madeleine had, with un-drugged and surprisingly free directness, kissed Judy’s open mouth. 

The first time, Judy had been shocked. She’d never kissed another woman that way (although she had imagined what that might be like). But Madeleine, the madwoman Gavin hated enough to kill with elaborate precision, who supposedly had to be drugged just to be polite in company, had, with uncomplicated joy, stolen a kiss from Judy, whose mouth had dropped open in unrehearsed, delighted surprise because of birdsong overhead. Open mouth on open mouth, nothing more than that except Judy’s own shocked inhalation of surprise, which had caused Madeleine to pull back, her face a study in ashamed panic. Judy’s first instinct was to comfort and reassure Madeleine, and so she had drawn Madeleine’s familiarly unfamiliar face back to hers, opened her lips against Madeleine’s mouth and let Madeleine make of that what she would.

That act had annihilated Madeleine’s shyness and Judy’s shame. Madeleine had pressed her tongue shyly into Judy’s mouth, and Judy, shocked and delighted, allowed it. Judy felt engulfed by the same fire that had enflamed the boys whom she’d left panting (only because society told her that was what she had to do) in Salina, Kansas. But now she felt no need to stop. She let Madeleine claim her mouth, and kissed her back to establish her own claim.

Back at the elegant ineptly named Brocklebank, Judy touched everything in Madeline's room, knowing that Madeleine had touched it first. She found an old teddy bear in the closet, and moved it into the bed covered with linens Madeleine had chosen. Madeleine had slept in. At first, Judy just cuddled the toy bear, but before long she cast it aside, instead writhing against high quality, high thread count cotton sheets, running her hands over her body the way she imagined Madeleine had touched herself, had touched Phyllidia, would touch Judy if their visits had been less carefully monitored.

At first, Judy forced herself through Gavin’s plan, always keeping Madeleine in mind, their secret plan to let Gavin pretend to kill Madeleine, condemning himself and leaving Judy and Madeleine free to be together.

But she hadn’t counted on Scottie, the patsy she meant to despise, maybe pity at best. The degree to which Gavin’s manipulations set him up for an easy fall to Judy’s Madeleine act should have made her hate him for being so weak, but she just couldn’t. His bachelor vulnerability (literally living under the shadow of Coit Tower! Using it as his landmark to guide both himself and his women home!) touched her deeply. He wasn’t one of the desperately panting boys who came from Salina, Kansas. His desperation came from something else entirely, something Judy could not begin to intuit. There was no reason for him not to be happily married to someone like his friend Midge. He was attractive, he had been successful, and the only reason she was in his life was that his one great failure had led to the same crippling weakness Gavin meant to exploit.

And when he kissed her by Pebble Beach, earnestly soaked up the nonsense she spewed in Muir Woods, Judy felt everything he did. She had no idea why he was so sad, so lonely, so desperate that he fell in love with her act as his supposed fellow alum’s allegedly mad wife. She wondered if his fondness for scotch had something to do with it, but his accomplishments as a police officer (prior to the accident Gavin pounced upon as a weakness to be exploited) suggested that his fondness for alcohol was either a newfound vice in light of his supposed failure on the rooftop, or that she was sensitive about drunkenness because of what she’d seen in her life in Salina, Kansas.

She eventually had to admit that Scottie was not a dipsomaniac. Gavin had seized on him because he’d read about his misadventure on the rooftop and correctly surmised that Scottie had developed a crippling fear of heights. Judy did not tell Gavin what she sensed from the start of his encounters with Scottie: that his vulnerability was far more deep-rooted than a newly-induced fear of heights, that he was so vulnerable to her impersonation of Madeleine because he had been, somewhere along the line, much more deeply hurt than Gavin realized. 

Not that Gavin would care. And Judy wasn’t supposed to care. She tried to tell Madeleine how deeply Scottie was touching her: his vulnerability, his desperate loneliness. Madeleine just looked around, kissed Judy passionately, and told her that all men were fools in their own way.

So Judy had played out Gavin’s melodrama. She and Madeleine had planned it all so carefully, but in the end, Gavin had trumped them. Judy had rushed up the stairs at San Juan Bautista, expecting to see the aftermath of Madeleine’s having shoved Gavin off the bell tower, but Gavin had broken Madeleine’s neck in advance, had anticipated Judy’s horror, grabbing her, holding her still against him while Madeleine sprawled, broken and dead, on the tiles below and Scottie impotently stood under the impossibly high stairs of the tower.

Afterwards, Judy had been in shock. She and Madeleine had been so sure they could outwit Gavin, that their love was stronger than his greed. In a daze, she’d accepted his payoff, but had ignored his advice, and her own instincts, and stayed in San Francisco. She’d taken a cheap room at the Empire, Gavin’s money in a bank account she never touched, stepping over bums on her way to work in the flower shop.

She’d dyed her hair brunette, as opposite a color from the icy champagne blonde of Gavin’s imagination of who Madeleine was (Judy knew better; knew that Madeleine’s hair was a sunny, welcoming yellow she always wanted to return to even though she no longer could). She’d started wearing the latest equivalents of the cheap fashions favored by beauty queens who came from Salina, Kansas. She styled her hair to emphasize its feminine length, and wore large, vulgar earrings.

Gavin left her alone, after telling her she was mad (again, that affected word for crazy) for not leaving The City. She knew he was right, but could not stop herself from being where Madeleine had loved to be, from trying to be as close to Madeleine as she could be. 

 

After the terrible events of that last night, she had nothing of Madeleine’s left. When Gavin had bought her off, he’d offered her the terrible choice of any one single thing from the apartment at the Brocklebank. Judy had been dazed by Madeleine’s death, by Sottie’s incarceration (thankfully, he was being treated in The City, at St. Joseph’s, across from Buena Vista Park, rather than at the expansive Benicia sanatorium where Judy had fallen in love with Madeleine). She had panicked, when presented with a choice, and picked the cheap imitation of Carlotta’s necklace, the piece that had been both disguise and alibi for her and Scottie. Later, she had thought of Madeleine’s teddy bear, that she had cuddled so briefly before discarding, and told herself that asking for the garish necklace was, in itself, an alibi: it was what Gavin Elster (whoever he really was) expected cheap Judy Barton, who came from Salina, Kansas, to select. Choosing the bear, or even the cool sheets she had writhed around in while imagining Madeleine’s unrestrained touches and kisses, would have been, paradoxically, too obvious.

Judy should have taken Gavin’s money (that he had murdered Madeleine to steal from her) and run away, toward the setting sun, where Japan was rebuilding itself, or toward the rising sun, where Europe was rebuilding itself, but she was riveted to The City. She had never imagined that Scottie was just as trapped, that he would know his Madeleine even though she had the hair, clothes, makeup and jewelry of Judy Barton, who came from Salina, Kansas.

Once Scottie had found her, Judy knew she should run far and fast from him. She even wrote him a letter, since that was the only way she could only tell him of Gavin’s and her own treachery. And even then she ended up tearing the letter up and instead chose to pretend she had never seen him before, never kissed him, never enjoyed the pleasure of his body. Despite that duplicitous intimacy, and her knowledge that, if she doled out careful intimacy and bashful revelation, she could control Scottie in ways Gavin had never dreamed, she could not bear even to hint of the conspiracy within that she and Madeleine had drafted. She knew that, should Scottie ever learn of how he had been manipulated, his memory of "Madeleine" should remain pure.

Her own memory of Madeleine should, she felt, remain equally as pure. She had endured, then even enjoyed , Scottie’s lovemaking when he believed her to be poor, mad Madeleine, was even half-way to believing the Carlotta legend. Madeleine had demanded details, and Judy had provided them, because Madeleine needed to hear of masculine desire driven to madness and beyond by the craftiness of women. Judy had never asked, but she had seen enough in Salina, Kansas, to suspect that Madeleine’s gleeful hatred of men stemmed from something aside from her own inbred inclination toward the love of women, beyond the abrupt disappearance of Phyllidia. 

Judy believed that Madeleine loved women sincerely, in a way that would have been natural and maybe even healthy (in the same way her instinctive rejection of fancy French liquor and chocolates in favor of fresh fruit was healthy for a woman whose madness was poorly understood even by the best doctors of the world). But sometimes, Madeleine gleefully and maliciously reveled in hearing about how Judy had cruelly shut down Scottie’s desires. Madeleine had even coached Judy in the best ways to frustrate and deny Scottie, and had been even more reluctant than Gavin when both had, independently of course, concluded that it was time for Judy to allow Scottie access to “Madeleine's” (deliberately wooden) body. 

Judy had, with a ruthlessness born from her memories of Salina, Kansas, and her dreams of a future shared with Madeleine, suppressed her own fondness for Scottie. She had only reported back to Gavin coldly on their physical intimacy, and forced herself to deride Scottie’s lovemaking to Madeleine. Madeleine had reveled in hearing of both Gavin’s and Scottie’s weaknesses, but Judy had neither the time nor the courage to ask Madeleine to tell her what man had hurt her so deeply that she hated all men so passionately. Judy loved Madeleine, and she believed in Madeleine’s love for her, but Judy had also known girls who came from Salina, Kansas, who hated men simply because their mothers had married the wrong man after the War killed their fathers, or whose uncles had been oddly, wrongly familiar with them. Madeleine, Judy believed, would have loved Phyllidia and Judy herself no matter what, but Judy also believed that there had been a peculiar uncle in Madeleine’s family.

Judy deeply regretted never having asked, never having the opportunity to find out who had interfered with Madeleine that way, because not knowing meant not being able to take revenge. Instead, she stayed in The City, despite the risks, despite having more than enough money to start her life elsewhere.

And when Scottie found her, she told herself she would be able to put Gavin behind her, put the conspiracy behind her. She’d made love to Scottie, pretending to be Madeleine. And when Scottie had touched her, kissed her, been so intimate with her, shown her the faces of himself he’d never show anyone, dropped his John “Scottie” Ferguson mask to trust her with the most intimate views of himself a man could give a woman, he’d really been doing that with Madeleine. And, and Judy hated to think about this, hated to think about anything that would tarnish her memories of Madeleine, Madeleine had, even while kissing and touching Judy, avidly demanded the details of Scottie’s desperate pleas and abased gratitude when making love to Judy-as-Madeleine. Judy’s carefully detailed recollections even fueled Madeleine’s desire for Judy’s touch.

So Judy had never told Madeleine, and certainly never told Gavin, the most intimate details of Scottie’s lovemaking. “His face sort of scrunched up like this,” she’d told Madeleine, making a ridiculous face that had nothing do with what she had seen in Scottie’s face as he had made love to the woman he believed to be Madeleine. Believed to be Carlotta. Madeleine had laughed, and Judy had forgiven Madeleine for that mockery.

As for Gavin, she just gave him a starkly biblical statement: “It is done,” and he’d handed her a fat envelope of twenty dollar bills she could never bring herself to spend.

But once Madeleine was dead (not that Judy could really believe that) and Gavin was gone (Judy was only too happy to believe that), Scottie had found her, and insisted on transforming her back into Madeleine. Every step of the process, from Scottie following her from the flower shop to the Empire, from her tearing up the letter that would have told Scottie at least some of the truth that lead to his undoing, had given her stark choices. 

And she had always chosen the path that lead to Scottie, to his re-creation of whom he believed Madeleine to be. Because the only way she would ever be close to Madeleine again, in this life, would be to be close to Scottie imagining her to be Madeleine.

It had been inevitable, not from when Scottie “rediscovered” her, not from when she closed her eyes and chucked herself into the Bay at Fort Point, not even from when she had first walked out of the Brocklebank, knowing he would follow her, nor even from when Gavin Elster had first spotted Judy Barton who came from Salina, Kansas and looked remarkably like his much despised but very wealthy wife.

No, what had sealed Judy’s fate was her insistence that she had to meet the woman she was conspiring to kill. Madeleine, for all her minor faults, for whatever damage had made Madeleine laugh at Gavin’s and Scottie’s separate but equally desperate plots, contortions and seductions, was Judy’s main chance. She knew Gavin’s plot was ridiculously intricate, and that her and Madeleine’s counter-plot was more implausible still, but at least they had love on their side rather than greed.

And lacking greed, lacking love, lacking Madeleine, Judy had clutched at her last possible connection to Madeleine: tried to be with the man who had loved her when she was pretending to be Madeleine, tried to make him love her, because being with him was almost like being with Madeleine, or at least as close as she could get in this life.

Judy had tried to get Scottie to love Judy Barton who came from Salina, Kansas, and had submitted herself to a familiar makeover because she’d been so desperate (with nearly the same kind of desperation that Scottie’s love for Judy-as-Madeleine had made the real Madeleine laugh with what sounded to Judy like something very close to real insanity). Had gone out on the town with Scottie, always managing to hold out, managing to inject enough of Judy into their dates that Scottie had held back.

Until he’d given Judy back a copy of the same dress she’d worn before, worn when she was just a prop Gavin was parading in front of Scottie. Until he’d forced her to put her newly champagne blonde hair in a French roll, and, oh, how much she wanted to submit to him, to let him see her as both Judy and Madeleine and to love the combination of the two he’d forged from the raw material their plots and nature had given him. So much so that she’d put on that ridiculous necklace in a moment of forgetfulness, wanting to fall and be pushed, to push and force Scottie to fall.

Because she could no longer have the person she truly wanted, because Madeleine was dead, but if she could be Madeleine for Scottie, maybe, somehow, Madeleine could live again, and Scottie could live again, and Judy could ride her entire life on that fragile connection.

It had taken her a shamefully long time to realize that she’d screwed up and put on that stupid Carlotta necklace, but as they’d driven south, through the lonely eucalyptus grove that defined the only vegetation between Gilroy and San Juan Bautista, she’d known she should never have torn up that letter, she should have kept and read it aloud to Scottie, and also read him the letter she had, in her grief, written to her memory of Madeleine after that terrible night, so he’d know that Judy Barton, who came from Salina, Kansas, was more than just a girl with an eye for the main chance; that she’d loved and loved deeply, loved Scottie, loved Madeleine even more, and never loved Gavin or the money he’d given her. But now that it was verging on too late, but she allowed herself to hope…..

To hope, even as Scottie dragged her up the stairs, visibly conquering his fear at a terrible price, even as he’d berated her, “You were a very apt pupil” and she’d nodded with terrified acquiescence, because if, in this moment, Scottie believed her to be an apt pupil, maybe he’d realize that she could learn to be the Madeleine he loved (not the real Madeleine, the real Madeleine would rather die than be pliable to any man) and they could somehow be together, each of them pretending that Judy was really Madeleine.

And they were there, they were so close, Scottie had nearly confronted the truth and allowed himself to tipped over into loving her, as both Madeleine and as Judy Barton who came from Salina, Kansas. Scottie was desperately angry, knowing he’d been betrayed, but underneath that….

The bell began to ring, and Judy knew in that split second that Scottie forgave her, loved her, even now that the illusion had nearly been shattered. 

Then she realized a horrible truth: she wasn’t sure if she could love him in return. She’d manipulated him too much, first with Gavin’s coaching, and then on her own. Could she find a way to honestly return his love when her whole relationship with him bad been built on her contempt and his weakness?

But before she was given a chance to make that choice, she looked over his shoulder, and saw that figure. She could have been Carlotta’s ghost, or Rose-Marie Watkins, now fully a bride of Christ, she could have even been a funhouse mirror version of Judy herself, but Judy only saw Madeleine, and Madeleine’s face was full of terrifyingly complete forgiveness, and her expression said, “Fly. Fly to me, Judy, and be my love….”

And Judy flew to Madeleine, to be her love.

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently, I am the sort of person who watches a movie like "Vertigo" once every three years or so from high school onwards, and one day says to herself, "Can I make this notoriously complicated murder plot even more convoluted? And, given that this is a Hitchcock movie from the '50s, can I throw in additional sexual repression while I'm at it?"


End file.
